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You are perfect strangers when you see him, his legs dangling over the edge of a rusted fire escape, in early winter. It's a week after your twelfth birthday, the air freezing because the atmosphere technicians in F-7 never seem to get it quite right. Never warm enough or too warm, never comfortable, never quite like Earth. You're on your way home from school.
He's scraping lead paint away from a window absently and doesn't notice you. Skinny, only a little taller, wearing an oversized bomber jacket with a tear in the right sleeve. You get stuck on his eyes; dark and petulant, cursing the world with a bitterness foreign to you. It's something you've seen before in the furious faces of the government dissenters and rebels dragged away from riots into armored shuttles. They are their own heady, exciting type of wilderness to you.
Then your boots crunching against the frosted grass give you away and those fathomless eyes slant down. You shift under the appraisal. You, pale in your too-large sweater. Small and birdlike, Earthly features ruined by telltale dark hair. He flicks a chip of paint into the air with a sneer like a switch.
"What are you looking at?" he asks, the barest hint of colony Russian in those rough syllables.
You blink up at him and say, "My name is Aleks."
It's been a long time since you've used your voice, since anybody's spoken to you enough to warrant a response. What comes out is hoarse and quiet. The boy tilts his head back and laughs; it's a loud sound that cuts through the cold air with a brightness that makes your fingers tingle.
"Sacha," he says, and slips off the fire escape to his feet in one sharp motion. "My neighbor Edit says she saw a real bullfrog at the reservoir. I think she's full of shit. You wanna go look?"
You follow him, then, and never really stop.
----
You turn thirteen in spring and take a book of Rilke poetry out of the tiny local library. You like it even if you've never seen recklessly blooming flowers in earnest, the sad little colony dandelions the only plants you have a name for. The poems make you think of Sacha. With all the melodrama of young adulthood you copy the best of them in a notebook to commit to memory.
To you I belong, however time may wear me away. From you to you I go commanded. You who never arrived in my arms, beloved, who were lost from the start.
Mismatched lines pieced together by your own rigid handwriting, entirely out of context. They mean everything to you. Years later, on a hot summer night when you are sixteen, you will rediscover the notebook tucked beneath your mattress. You will read it and it will embarrass you, each sentimental pen stroke too much. You will throw the pages out.
Later still, when you are an adult, you will find yourself wishing you could remember the words again in the cramped quarters of an old spaceship. Now, though, you carry them in your heart like a song.
Your father's girlfriend locks you out the same weekend. Even from outside you hear the sound of her, drunk, reeling through the house. You are hungry and sit in the tall grass of the vacant lot next door with your book and a slowly cramping stomach. It gets dark and after some time there are footsteps. Sacha is crouched beside you, holding out a piece of bread because he always knows.
"Your mom kick you out again, myshonok?" he asks. You pick lint from your sweater and shrug.
"She's not my mother," you inform him after a beat. He snorts.
"Oh. Figures. She doesn't look like you at all, that stupid fucking hag." A smirk now, slow and conspiratorial. "More like a witch, y'know, with her big ugly nose."
You laugh in spite of yourself and his grin widens at the muffled sound. And then you are crying and trying to stop, burying your head in your knees like a little kid. Sacha puts a gangly arm around you and whispers his strange colony Russian in your ear. He may say as many as a hundred useless words then, none of which you understand, before you can finally sniffle and wipe your eyes.
"We're going to get the fuck out of this place," he tells you, and for years you will repeat it to yourself like a mantra.
----
Sacha crawls in through your window at two in the morning when you are fourteen. Bloody nosed and bruised, shaking with anger or adrenaline or something else entirely. You wake when you hear the pane rattle and get up to make him sit on your bed. You've learned this routine by heart, down to the clenching and unclenching of his fists as he tries to avoid your gaze.
"Did you get into a fight?" You know better but ask anyway, pale fingers ghosting by his jaw without thinking. He grabs your wrist in a flash, too tight, not quite angry. The contact spikes your pulse.
"No," Sacha mutters, averts his eyes again and lets go. Your brain stutters and freezes for a moment, stuck on the feeling of warmth his hand left on you.
He keeps quiet and still and let's you do your best to fix up his face in the dark. You don't say any more; Sacha never tells you anything, only gets angry when you ask about his family. You've never even been inside of his house, only glimpsing the dirty front steps of the tiny apartment once or twice. Heard the kind of things people at school say about them. Enough to know what 'gypsy trash' means to him and to everybody else, at least.
He fidgets when you're finished, staring down at two pairs of knees barely touching. "Wish they ignored me. Like yours do."
You think for a moment of the father who refuses to look at you, try to remember the last thing he said to you or if he's ever said anything at all. Count the nights he comes home from work to sleep like the dead while his girlfriend locks you out. Don't know if it's better or worse, decide that it doesn't matter.
"Oh," you whisper.
Then Sacha kisses you on the mouth for the first and last time, teeth clicking together with the suddenness of it. Your breath hitches and your heart hammers. When he presses rough fingers to your skin you come apart like overripe fruit.
----
You pass fitfully into summer at fifteen. The F-7 skyline simmers and warps in the humid heat and the women at the store fuss about the false atmosphere and write angry letters. Sacha stops going to school, leaves home, and finds a condemned building to live in instead. Plenty of kids in the colonies doing the same thing, so you find a few old quilts to bring to him and keep your fussing to yourself.
He chain smokes and gets angry too easily, all of the wild energy of childhood turned to furious scorn for the colonies in adolescence. Sometimes he makes it hurt when you fuck, makes it something more than transient; a souvenir by scrape or bruise or scar. Never sure if he slaps or bites because he knows you like it or if it's because he likes it too. It doesn't matter.
One morning you steal a packet of seeds to try to grow some basil in the patch of dirt behind his building. People would just steal it if you grew it in the lot by your tower block. Sacha must hear you digging outside, because he shimmies out of the dented back door of the apartment. Barks a laugh as he moves to stretch out on the yellow grass nearby; all whipcord muscle and bone now, taller by at least a foot.
"You're not going to be able to grow anything, you idiot. All that crap soil they dumped on this stupid fucking planet isn't worth shit if all the water and air's polluted," he sucks his teeth, shaking the packet of remaining seeds by his ear to hear the hollow rattle before he continues.
"What do you think all those big ugly greenhouses in F-5 are for, huh? You think they want us all growing our own food when they can work us to death in the factories to buy it from them?" His voice is hard now, bitter.
You frown and shrug, could never understand being so angry at a place when neither of you have even been outside of F-7's walls. You know he's waiting for some kind of response and you let him wait. Bide your time until Sacha sighs and drags you onto the cool quilts inside to take you apart piece by piece.
----
The winter of your sixteenth birthday is too cold and Sacha still wears that stupid bomber jacket, tattered but fitting better these days. You're on your way home from the store when you spot him, leaning against a brick wall by the loading docks at dusk. He doesn't see you yet, never the one to notice you first, always too small and quiet in the dark to attract attention.
You watch him grind out a cigarette and approach an idling car. The horn of a freight train sounds loudly in the distance so all you catch is: "I'll show you something nice."
You're not surprised, really, knew Sacha had to be making money somehow. You shuffle enough to make him whirl around, mumbling something to the driver before he's squaring his shoulders to walk over to you.
"What are you doing here?" he hisses, a hand clenching tight around your wrist like that first time in your bed but so different. You remember the split lips and bruised ribs, wonder which is better. It doesn't matter.
"Buying milk."
"Then fuck off," Sacha snaps, bravado not big enough to conceal the shame in his eyes. The car beeps impatiently.
"Walk with me." It sounds stupid as soon as it comes out of your mouth and still not as bad as the other thousand things you could say. Anything to keep him with you.
"Go home, myshonok," he says in a half-hearted command and doesn't look at you when he climbs into the car.
----
At seventeen you find a job at a dress factory embroidering fancy clothing for rich blonde people on Earth. The pay is next to nothing but the women you work with are kind and don't harass you, give you a little of their lunches when they can. Your back is permanently stiff from so many hours spent hunched over, your fingers covered in tiny needle pricks, but it's enough.
Can't quit because you get kicked out for good that same fall, father silent and tired in his armchair. His girlfriend stands by the door with crossed arms.
You consider saying something to him as you collect your belongings. Discover with a strange pang in your chest that you can't think of anything, tht there's nothing between you but years spent as two ships passing in the night. You sneak into his room and take the small butterfly knife you know he keeps in the dresser, put it in your cardboard box, and leave without a backwards glance.
You go to Sacha's that evening to find he isn't home or anywhere else you can think to look. You read a book and wait on the doorstep for hours, insides knotting up as the time passes.
He stumbles in at quarter to six, disoriented and pale, shrugging you away when you follow him inside. Swallows a handful of painkillers and curls up on a stack of old quilts by the empty fireplace without a word. You watch him drift in and out of sleep and catalogue the black eye and other smaller bruises, keeping track the only way you know how.
Time passes slowly. In the morning he wakes to pace the house, eyes burning brightly and more intensely than you can ever remember. He stares at the box with all of your stuff in it, tells you he has a plan, and that's that.
You follow him down to the recruitment office silently. You sign too many years of your life away to a military that doesn't want you. It's the easiest thing you've ever done; not what you'd choose, but enough to keep him with you.
Sacha grabs your hand beneath the terraformed sky. He says, "We're going to get the fuck out of this place."
----
You turn nineteen not long after they ship you out, learn every detour and hiding place everywhere you end up. Put your father's butterfly knife to good use, spending hours learning exactly how to use it. You find early on that almost two decades of silence and quickness are a boon to you; when you slice up the first man that tries to corner you it's as easy as anything else. Easier on your fingers than embroidery, even.
You spend a week in the brig for the mess and find Sacha waiting for you when you get out. He pulls you clumsily inside a cramped utility closet to bite your neck, pushing your back against the cool metal wall. You shiver and press the knife into his hands until he takes it and leaves a series of neat shallow cuts on your chest. Like numerals, you think, when you examine them later.
----
Someday soon you will become strangers again. You will watch him tear himself apart, build bridges and burn them, fly too close to the sun. He will wash away the filth of the colonies and strip himself of his histories like a slow baptism. You will watch him, always watching him, holding on like loose change in his pockets.
Someday soon his third navigator will have a scar on his mouth; pinker, fresher, and more visible than any of your own. And Sacha will stare at this blonde boy from across a room on shore leave and you'll realize he's become somebody else without you noticing.
You will curl up in your bunk and try to recall any of the sentimental lines from your old notebook. Remember a feral fifteen year old who made and kept a promise; the only thing he could really give you, the only small degree to which you could ever belong to each other.
You will become two people who never really meet, two atoms that never quite touch, nothing to show for it but a handful of scar tissue and a faint memory of the pain you once felt there.